THE NEW YORKER , '.,T ' 1< '- t :. hi" { y J \II ,"'<-> v < . J ìtt ... ' '\ .. t ' r J t , . " '!í ' I \ 'Î v,ø: I 1,1:' ! "'\", '! " \ ,', ..r,, t '.- r "".. """" . ' / r , '., " " I. ..., '* .J? '. , , seen all those photographs. She would never have found the box, except that I was in the bathtub and she was poking around in my mother's room, fiddling with knobs and ashtrays and envelopes and boxes until I came out. Once, I had been terribly embarrassed because some friend to whom I had been showing the pictures had come across one, an old brown snapshot of my mother, skiing somewhere in Europe, posing with only ski pants on and her hreasts bare. It was an awful moment-worse than the dis- covery of some pictures In which both m} parents were at parties, leaning against dark walls, dressed pecuharly as they did in the twenties, and grinning drunkenly or drinking and kissing. The pictures were different from the ones Linda and ] and our friends took at parties; the} were somehow more seri- ous. But the one of my mother sk1Îng practically naked was the reason I had more or less hidden the box. I was afraid of that picture. Once in a while, alone, I would go through the box and find it My mother saw me looking at it once, and didn't SdY dnything. But she had taken the box, later, and put it under lots of other things on a shelf in her room. She didn't understand that I, too, wanted to hide it. Linda found the box, however. When I came out, she was studying, '"'I( . " '\J 'I -l j t . 'N- d(!r \ w . ..", f q , ,1\ 0&. o r pY .... -' d J) \ \ I t , , t \ ) , .' \ \p l t .;.. .. ". . . briefly, one after another, a lot of brown pictures of people I didn't even know. She had put aside three: the one of my mother skiing; a formal photograph of my mother as a young girl with long, long hair, her shoulders draped in scarves, and posing as though she were looking at herself in a mIrror, her eyes half closed and her eyebrows raised (she still assumed that expression when she looked in the mirror); and a snapshot of my father, at about thirty, with lots of blond hair (long since gone), looking like a movie star. He had been a very handsome young man. She had reserved these three pictures for discus- sion with me. I ignored them untIl she was ready for them, and we went laughing through the rest of the box As she looked at each pIcture, Linda would put it aside, onto the bed, and when she finall} finished the whole pIle, she threw them back into the box-all except the three she had held out-closed it, put it on the table, re- settled herself, and picked up the three most interesting pictures. I definitely agreed with Linda that they were the three most interesting. "This is Jerry," she said, "and Mari- an, and Marian" I desperately thought of telling her that the woman sk1Îng was not my mother, but it quite obviously was. 55 " ! .I '\dl , . ......" 0( . < :t 0., \ y"," <' t- \' " I , d , Ii'" , :;;, .: '( '\ , ..... ,"^ í .... .{ " < "How come your mother's not wear- ing anything?" Linda said. I shrugged my shoulders. "She's wearing pants," I said. "I suppose it gets warm when you're skiing." "There's snow," Linda said. "Yes, but that doesn't mean it's cold. There's snow there all summer long. The sun makes it hot." "Well, anyway," Linda said, "was she all by herself? " "I doubt it," I said, suddenly haughty. "You know my parents" "Yes, that's what I mean," Linda said. "My mother would never go around with no top on. Even in the house" She stared at the picture for a while. "I guess that's just the way they are." "Well, she doesn't do it now, you know " "No, but she could That's what I mean about your parents." She used the word "liberal" agaIn, and I picked up the other picture of my mother Linda put aside the first, and looked with me at the second. "V\'hat is she wearing?" LInda said. "Is it a formal? " "No. That's the way they used to make them look, to take pictures Some kind of stuff." "She looks beautiful," Linda said "Sort of aesthetic." "She wasn't as fat," I said. My fa-